Adrian Belew - Painting with Guitar (with Julie Slick), Philadelphia 7.1.10

[Geno]

Well, this was something different. Adrian's been blogging about downsizing his rig lately, and sure enough, the stage looked more like a home studio room than an actual concert space. The sides of the stage had a couple easels with six paintings from the Side series' front & back covers. In the middle was a stool surrounded by maybe two footboards and two monitors, and that was about it. Everything was mostly run through a laptop. He could have been surfing Facebook during the breaks for all we knew.

The set was almost all a departure from the usual as promised. He opened with a Bears song called "Doodles" (fittingly enough) and followed up with a mix of new material, the usual "Drive"/Beatle medley, a section of e and some solo rarities from Side One and Op Zop. The familiar tunes such as "Drive" still got interestingly changed with some different (often dirty-grungy) guitar tones. The new stuff was mainly an extended instrumental suite based on texturing, looping and automated pitch-shifting. A little noodly, but I suppose with a show like this one is allowed to get self-indulgent.

Julie Slick gave a great performance for her opening half-hour, consisting of pieces from her album played to the backing tracks although not quite the same as on record. "Mora" for instance had some trip-hoppy changing around of the voice samples, and they all had some new lead solos. These were all interspersed with some background stories and nerdy gear talk in keeping with the spirit of the show. Two shows may be a small start for her, but so far a good one; I really hope this leads to more.

All in all, highly worth it. There was enough song-based material for the evil mistress to enjoy, enough guitar meandering to satisfy the ones who wanted some weirdness, and the Q&A made for some good laughs and good stories, ranging from the predictable 80s-Crim issue to what life was like with the Zappas. I don't know if it's the kind of thing that'll happen again in the future, but it would be great if so.

[Kram]

Thanks for the great review Geno! I hope these shows are recorded for posterity.

[Geno]

I hope these shows are recorded for posterity.

Well, Ade did mention that he was recording the shows (with the aforementioned laptop) and would be sending out one song to an email list of the folks who bought the new DVD. I suppose it's possible more will emerge later on?

[Robinslick]

Julie's got a bunch of her videos from last night up on her Facebook page but her webmaster cut out all the banter between songs.  Maybe in retrospect, that's a good idea because she's definitely taking her show on the road exclusive of Adrian and it would probably be a bummer for people to know in advance what she says about Mr. Fripp and Mastelotto and all her nerd gear tech talk.

So if you are interested and aren't already a friend of hers on FB, she's obviously there under "Julie Slick".